Monthly Archives: May 2016

John Stoker opened the “Gold Miners’ Arms” Hotel in Lambton in 1865 and was the licensee up until 1885. In 1869 Mr Stoker extended his premises and built a large upstairs hall (40 feet by 24 feet) that was often used for various meetings or social gatherings. This hall was often referred to as “Stoker’s Hall”, “Stokers Long Room” or “Druids Hall”. From around 1871 the hotel is also known as the “Gold Miners’ Home” hotel.

The University of Newcastle Cultural Collections has a couple of photos of this hotel, and by comparing these with one of the frames from a 1904 panorama of Lambton taken from the North Lambton hill, I was able to confirm that Stoker’s hotel was situated on the north-east corner of Elder and Grainger streets.

"Mr. Stoker himself is going to extend his premises by building an assembly room sufficiently large to contain 500 people. Such an edifice is very much wanted here, as there is not at present any place in the township (chapels excepted,) able to contain 150 persons."

First newspaper reference to the "Gold Miners' Home" hotel.
"TO LET in the rising township of Lambton, a Shop and Dwelling-house, with stabling, opposite the Gold Miners' Home. Apply to JOSEPH HUNTER on the premises."

At the license renewal hearing "Sergeant Harrison stated the building was composed of weatherboards, very old, but in a fair state of repair. Of the seven bedrooms, four were for the public use. Practically no catering was done for travellers."

I watched two rugby league matches this weekend. Yesterday I watched my son’s under 15’s team beaten by the Belmont North Sharks 74 to 10, and today I watched my local NRL team the Knights go down to the Cronulla Sharks 62 to 0, for a combined deficit over two games of 126 points. That’s one hell of a shark bite. Ouch!

Moments before Sosaia Feki crosses for yet another try for the Cronulla Sharks.

It happened again this morning on my way to work. An elderly man (not the same man as before) doing his ‘civic duty’ by throwing rubbish into the drain beside Hunter Stadium. This time however, I foolishly decided to challenge him about this, and in return copped a gobful of abuse telling me to mind my own f****** business.

As I rode away afterwards I reflected … I’m a human being living on this planet … it IS my business to care about how humanity is trashing the planet.

I bought a HP2101nw wireless USB print server for a bargain price from an eBay seller, and I had trouble getting it working on my Windows 7 64 bit laptop.When installing the software to configure the print server, there was an error about the driver not installing correctly, and the configuration software wouldn’t recognise the print server and allow it to be configured.

When I checked the system requirements I found that the HP support page only listed 32 bit drivers for Windows XP or Windows Vista. For a while I rued not checking the system requirements more carefully before purchasing, and thought I’d done my dough.

But with a little more perseverance I found that a 32 bit Windows operating system was required only for the initial configuration of the device (to set the WiFi network and password) and after that I was able to get connections to the print server working from other Windows based PC’s. The steps that worked for me were:

Using a Windows 7 32 bit laptop, I installed and ran the configuration software from the supplied CD, and configured the printer server with the WiFi network and password.

My 14 year old son is full of excitement having made his debut appearance on “The Footy Show” last night … for all of about one second as he jumps up in the background crowd, two thumbs up and right next to Beau Ryan’s nose.

My latest article for the Lambton Local is now available, this month on the Mechanics’ Institute. Read about the distance that this educational building travelled by bullock power through the streets of Lambton to its present location.